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Testing With Laravel In Maintenance Mode

Testing With Laravel In Maintenance Mode

It is standard in our projects to include simple routes which are used to signify if the application is alive and working. They are primarily polled by Kubernetes liveness probes. The tests are...

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Customising The fallbackPlaceholder In Laravel's Fallback Route

Customising The fallbackPlaceholder In Laravel's Fallback Route

There is a neat feature in Laravel called a Fallback Route. This is the route which will handle the request if none of the others can: Route::fallback(Controller::class); The fallback...

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PhpStorm "No appropriate protocol" Database Error

PhpStorm "No appropriate protocol" Database Error

We recently started migrating from MySQL Workbench to use PhpStorm's internal database integration. In doing so we came across a rather cryptic error: The last packet successfully received from...

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Image Compression For High DPR Images

Image Compression For High DPR Images

Images typically account for 40% of the size of a webpage. This makes them a key thing to look at when optimising a site. Image optimisation typically involves resizing and compressing it to be as...

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Midday Mooch

Midday Mooch

A few weeks back I was booking a training course. The company we booked with, up the road from us in Wimborne, were doing something that caught my eye: the midday mile. They mentioned a range...

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Storing Multi Currency Prices In Laravel

Storing Multi Currency Prices In Laravel

Recently I was involved with building a new module for our internal Intranet. It is responsible for storing all the details of our subscriptions; name, start/end dates, price, notes... All simple...

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Image Focal Point Auto Detection

Image Focal Point Auto Detection

A recent trend with CMSes is to do focal point based media cropping. Traditionally an image is uploaded and then is cropped/scaled to the required size, eg a thumbnail. The problem is that crops...

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Volunteering at The Country Corner

Volunteering at The Country Corner

It's difficult sometimes to find places for a small team to volunteer just for a day or two, so although we get a fantastic 3 volunteering days a year, we sometimes struggle to find places locally...

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Tracking scripts, privacy and performance

Tracking scripts, privacy and performance

So earlier this week I wrote a post with some recommendations for website owners to help them keep abreast of online privacy requirements. The post came out of internal discussions about where we...

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